Resumen de Sappho, Selanna and the poetry of the night
In this essay I argue that Fragmentum Adespotum 976 is not a fragment but a short whole poem and not without a mistress. This mistress is Sappho. The authoress of the poem presents herself as being abandoned at night, in painful contrast to the mythical paradigm of Selene (Sappho’s Selanna) and Endymion who reunite at nightfall. This pairing of an immortal goddess and a mortal man is the counterpoint of the paradigm of Sappho and Tithonos (known before, but published in a fuller form by Martin West in “The New Sappho” in ZPE 151 (2005) 3-9). I also explore the implications of her two-line poem addressing Hesperos (104a in Edgar Lobel and Denys Page in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, Oxford 1955). The last stage of this project is to explore the history of the interpretation of the four lines of this “fragment” and the two lines of the Hesperos poem from Antiquity to A.E. Housman, who knew and responded to both.
